Pretty Prague

So! On to our next adventure! We are on our train from Prague to Vienna, and we have our own sleeper car this time, so unlike last time where we thought we were going to be alone then ended up having car-mates, this time we booked a car for ourselves. It was the only type of car available on this train. Prague was fantastic – I think it is definitely a contender for one of the prettiest cities in Europe. All the buildings are beautiful! We definitely got to know the city – so much so that by the end of our stay, we could find our way to pretty much any area without a map. It’s as simple as we knew where everything was in relation to the Old Town Square, a quaint pedestrian square in the middle of town. Day one wasn’t a whole day, as we arrived around 10:00, but we made good use of it. Day two we got up early and beat the crowds many places, so that was good. We ended up paddle boating on the river at the end of our second day (Katie’s idea. Her thoughts were that our legs were tired and so we should go paddle boating. Haha). Paddle boating was really fun, and there is a video to come of that. We explored the whole city in two days, and decided we had pretty much seen it all, so the third day of our stay, we went on a day trip to a castle nearby that Rick Steves recommends in his guidebook. You would think it was simple to find a castle, because it should stick out, right? Well, we had some major problems. First we couldn’t find the train platform we were supposed to be on in Prague, because they added the suffix of “J” to the platform number, and we could not for the life of us find the platform 1J. As it turns out, the “J” actually means south (the Czech word for south starts with a J) and we finally got on the right train. When it came time to transfer, we had to wait an hour for our next train, and got to spend some time at a Czech train station. The next train was only two cars long and we got off at what we thought was our stop. The directions in the book to get to the castle literally say “Walk 10 minutes uphill” – so we did. I can tell you, there are no castles up that hill we walked. We did see about 10 snails and 2 slugs, our wildlife sighting for the day (Dad do we get a campfire now??), although I’m not sure how wild slugs and snails are…We walked back down the hill to the train station and had to wait 45 minutes for the train to come back and take us back to Prague. It was the same conductor driving the train, so they must have thought we were crazy. But it was a fun side trip and a great train ride. It was raining all day (yuck) so we got to spend most of it inside. After we got back, we spent the rest of our Czech Korunnas on food and souvenirs and then headed to the train station and waited for our night train to Vienna. Good news, in the sleeper car the beds are long enough that I can fit in them! Well, as they say in Prague, Na shledanou! (try to pronounce that!)